Month: September 2017

A study reported this week in JAMA Pediatrics found that children who watched a movie excerpt in which characters used firearms were more interested in playing with a handgun than children who watched an expurgated version from which images of firearms had been excised. The researchers think their findings could be important in reducing fatal firearm accidents involving children. Jenny Anderson, who wrote a Quartz story about the study, thinks it tells us something about the roots of gun violence. Here is why they are wrong.

In the experiment, Wittenberg University communication researcher Kelly Dillon and Ohio State psychologist Brad Bushman used 20-minute excerpts from two PG-rated movies, National Treasure and The Rocketeer. They randomly assigned 52 pairs of 8-to-12-year-olds to watch either the original scenes or the expurgated, gun-free version, then let the kids play for 20 minutes in a room that contained a disabled handgun in a drawer as well as various toys and games. The subjects were monitored by a video camera and an infrared sensor in the gun that recorded trigger pulls.

On average, the subjects who watched movie excerpts featuring firearms held the handgun longer and pulled the trigger more than the subjects who watched the firearm-free versions. The difference in handling time was not statistically significant after Dillon and Bushman adjusted the data to take into account potential confounding variables such as sex, age, aggressiveness, and attitudes toward guns. But the difference in trigger pulls was robust and dramatic. Whether it has any practical significance is another matter.

Dillon and Bushman worry that children who see guns in movies will be more likely to play with them in real life, with potentially fatal consequences. The implication is that more guns in the movies kids see will mean more fatal gun accidents. But there is no evidence of such a correlation. To the contrary, unintentional firearm fatalities involving children have been falling for decades even though, according to Dillon and Bushman, “gun violence in movies is increasing, especially in movies that target younger viewers.”

Dillon and Bushman cite a study that found the depiction of guns in popular PG-13 movies “has more than doubled since 1985” and a follow-up study that found “the amount of gun violence in PG-13 films continued to increase through 2015.” During that period, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accidental gun deaths involving children 14 or younger fell by 83 percent, from 278 in 1985 to 48 in 2015.

Reasonable people may disagree about the best way to make further progress in reducing the number of children accidentally killed by guns. But even if we assume that the behavior observed in the highly artificial conditions of Dillon and Bushman’s experiment carries over into the real world, securing guns so that children cannot play with them seems like a much more practical approach than restricting their movie viewing or banning guns from PG-13 movies.

While Dillon and Bushman focus on accidental deaths, Jenny Anderson worries in her Quartz piece that seeing guns in movies will make kids “more violent.” Again, there is no evidence that is happening. Even after increases in 2015 and 2016, the violent crime rate in the United States is much lower today than it was in the mid-1980s, notwithstanding the proliferation of cinematic gun play that worries Anderson.

“This research suggests violent media merits our attention,” Anderson concludes. “Exhausting as it may be for parents, being overbearing would seem to pay off.” No one who disagrees with that sentiment will change his mind after reading this study.

In the wake of the Equifax breach, in which hackers stole names, social security numbers, and other personal information for more than 143 million people from the credit scoring agency’s databases, Americans are rightfully more concerned about holding financial institutions accountable for misusing or losing valuable data.

Democrats have now tried to turn the Equifax breach to their political advantage, whipping up a dry-but-important battle over financial regulation into a populist squall.

Republicans want to repeal a new rule by the Consumer Financial Protection Agency banning arbitration clauses in contracts signed between consumers and financial services companies, including banks and credit card companies. The new CFPB rule requires disputes or settlements in banks fraud or other customer betrayal cases to be settled through class-action lawsuits rather than a third-party arbitrator. Despite mixed evidence, the CFPB says banning arbitration is good because it allows consumers “their day in court.”

Republicans have turned to the Congressional Review Act to wipe the CFPB’s arbitration rule off the books. The law is a now-familiar tool used to repeal about a dozen Obama-era regulations since President Donald Trump took office in January.

The House voted along party lines in July to pass a CRA resolution repealing the rule, and the Senate is set to vote on the same resolution perhaps as soon as this week. The White House has indicated its support for the move

“Forced arbitration is a tool that big corporations use to silence victims of corporate fraud or corporate abuse,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said Tuesday during brief remarks on the Senate floor, invoking the Equifax breach. “Forcing these families to sign away their rights is not only wrong, it’s dangerous.” Similar rhetoric is blaring from television screens in some states, like Maine, where ads funded by Allied Progress Action, a progressive campaign organization, are targeting Republican senators seen a swing votes on the CRA resolution. “Big corporations like Equifax got caught trying to sneak it past you,” the ads say, referring to the arbitration clauses sometimes included in financial services contracts.

Those ads—and the Democratic talking points about the arbitration rule—are flawed in several ways. “If there were a consumer bureau for political ads—not that there should be—this one would be facing some penalties for deception,” says John Berlau, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank opposed to the arbitration rule.

It’s not accurate to say that arbitration clauses eliminate anyone’s rights. Only government can do that. These are private contracts between banks or credit card companies and their customers. If customers agree to waive their rights to a class-action lawsuit and accept arbitration instead, that’s something they are free to do, Berlau says. By banning arbitration, it’s the CFPB withholding choices from consumers.

The CFPB and its defenders say they are protecting consumers, a second flaw in its thinking. Studies show, often, if not always, wronged customers end up getting bigger payouts through arbitration than through the courts. After lawyers’ fees, the average payout in class-action suits was only $32.38 per person, according to the CFPB’s own data. Research by Todd Zywicki, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a free market think tank, and Jason Scott Johnson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that arbitration is “an inexpensive, fast, and efficient process” compared to the time consuming process of class action lawsuits.

When CFPB Director Richard Courdray announced last year that the bureau was aiming to steer disputes away from arbitration and into the legal system, he said it was a fulfillment of a “core American principle,” that all consumers should have their day in court. On the Senate floor Tuesday, Brown agreed, arguing that a Republican repeal would undermine that principle.

But given the choice between getting a day in court and getting a better settlement, most Americans would probably take the latter.

Framing the debate as a matter of big corporations versus powerless consumers misses a key part of the dynamic. Small banks and credit unions are opposed to the CFPB rule too. Camden R. Fine, president and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade association representing smaller banks, says arbitration has been a useful and cost-effective tool for both customers and community banks to settle customer disputes.

“It isn’t economically feasible under the new rule for community banks to continue to pay the costs associated with arbitration for customers if banks are forced to carry the high legal costs associated with class-action lawsuits,” he says. Those higher costs will be passed along to customers, most of whom will gain little or nothing from the CFPB’s ban on arbitration.

The CFPB’s arbitration ban doesn’t help consumers and doesn’t help banks, but it would be a major boon to trial lawyers. The arbitration ban is another proxy war in a long-running battle between business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and trial lawyers, as Politico’s Lorraine Woellert reported last month.

There’s a lot of money at stake. The CFPB study that supposedly justified the new rule shows that class action attorneys made more than $424 million in the three-year period examined in the study. Consumers during that time, if you’ll remember, got settlements averaging $32 apiece.

Around this time last year, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced it would begin accepting applications for a license to cultivate marijuana for research purposes. This was thrilling news for cannabis advocates, as it suggested the DEA was finally open to ending the University of Mississippi’s 50-year monopoly on legal marijuana cultivation.

“The DEA just made it easier do research on weed,” a Wired headline declared.

A year after that announcement, the DEA has yet to approve a single license application and now acting DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg is set to resign over differences with the Justice Department. One of those differences? The Justice Department’s refusal to let the DEA grant any licenses to grow research marijuana.

“[T]he Justice Department has effectively shut down this program to increase research registrations,” an anonymous DEA source told the Washington Post in August of this year. “They’re sitting on it,” another source said of cultivation applications the DEA sent to the Justice Department for final approval.

When STAT News asked the DEA in July how many licenses it had granted, they got smoke-screened. “The DEA says it does not have a timeline to approve or deny applications and noted that it is dealing with a new review process,” STAT’s Andrew Joseph reported. “All applicants remain under review and none has been rejected.” Now we know it’s because Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his people are keeping those applications in regulatory limbo.

In an August 2016 letter to the governors of Rhode Island and Washington, Rosenberg, who will likely be out of his role by the end of the week, wrote that marijuana would only be rescheduled through the FDA’s drug approval process, but that the DEA would “continue to work with NIDA to ensure that there is a sufficient supply of marijuana and its derivatives to support legitimate research needs. Part of that support includes “approving additional growers of marijuana to supply researchers.”

The Washington Post asked Rosenberg last month if he’d changed his mind on the latter promise. His response: “I stand by what I wrote.” That’s the closest thing I’ve seen to Rosenberg publicly pointing the finger at his boss.

In addition to battling over marijuana cultivation licenses, Rosenberg reportedly disagreed with Sessions that MS-13 is a major factor in the American drug trade (Rosenberg is more worried about Mexican cartels). He also condemned President Donald Trump’s speech to police officers in Long Island, during which Trump encouraged cops to rough up suspects. “When you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon—you just see them thrown in, rough—I said please don’t be too nice,” Trump told the audience.

“The President, in remarks delivered yesterday in New York, condoned police misconduct regarding the treatment of individuals placed under arrest by law enforcement,” Rosenberg wrote in an email to DEA staff.

Rosenberg didn’t quit solely over marijuana research, and his support for more heavily controlled cultivation certainly doesn’t amount to support for marijuana legalization. But his exit from the DEA gives Sessions a chance to install—via Trump’s nomination—someone who won’t press the marijuana issue at all.

The head of the Salt Lake Police Association has watched the country’s outrage over the videos showing a nurse getting arrested for refusing to draw a man’s blood without a warrant and has decided the correct response is to complain that the public got to see what its officers did.

Union head Stephen Hartney sent a letter to the city’s mayor and police chief to complain video of the brief arrest of nurse Alex Wubbels has made “pariahs” of Det. Jeff Payne and his watch commander at the time of the incident, Lt. James Tracy.

Wubbels became an insta-celebrity on Labor Day weekend after she released police body camera footage showing Payne very forcefully arresting her at University of Utah Hospital because she refused his demand that she draw blood from an unconscious victim of a nasty high-speed car crash. The patient, William Gray, was not a suspect, nor involved in the chase, and Payne didn’t have a warrant. Wubbels, surrounded by staff at the hospital, explained that she was not permitted to draw the man’s blood. Payne arrested her, in what appeared on video to be sheer frustration at having been defied.

Payne and Tracy have been placed on leave while the case was investigated. A couple of weeks ago the city revealed an internal investigation and a civilian review board determined the two officers violated department policies.

Hartney this week complained the police body camera footage should not have been publicly released until the investigation was completed. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

The letter said the union was, at this point, not arguing or even discussing the merits of the allegations raised against the officers. “Rather we are solely concerned… with the ‘investigatory process’ which we believe has been corrupted.”

The letter claims the city has not followed an “agreed upon and carefully scripted process” for investigating the conduct of police officers. At the news conference, Hartney focused on if the city should have released the footage so soon under the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA), considering the release could have interfered with the internal affairs investigation.

The release of the body cam footage and information from the disciplinary investigation “has created a public furor which makes reasoned determinations difficult, if not impossible,” the letter states.

The city, however, didn’t release the videos. It agreed to a request by Wubbels to release the footage to her, following the law Hartney referenced. The city said it had no good reason to deny the video footage to Wubbels.

The two officers weren’t even put on administrative leave until after Wubbels went public with the video footage.

What might have been forgotten in all of this is Wubbels released the video because she believed she was exposing a widespread problem of police bullying nurses into drawing blood without consent or a warrant.

And while Wubbels was pleased the Salt Lake City Police had been responsive to her claims of abuse, she and other hospital staff were concerned about other law enforcement agencies, including university police. Campus police did absolutely nothing during the arrest, and since then the hospital has implemented new policies to limit police access to parts of the hospital.

Public pressure and response is important to holding police officers accountable. They are public servants, and Hartney’s responses, like we’ve seen from other police union leaders, misuse the concept of due process to try to conceal information from the people to whom the police are supposed to answer.

Yesterday we saw that a North Carolina law exempting body camera footage from public records requests was very clearly being used to try to shield police from exposure of conduct that might expose them to public criticism.

Gray, the car crash victim unable to consent to Payne’s demand for a blood draw, died Monday while still in the hospital.